The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for boosting remote direct memory access (RDMA) performance using a cryptographic hash based approach.
A cryptographic hash function is a hash function that can be defined as a deterministic procedure that takes an arbitrary block of data and returns a fixed-size bit string, the hash value, such that an accidental or intentional change to the data will change the hash value. The data to be encoded is often called the “message,” and the hash value is sometimes called the message digest or simply the digest. The ideal cryptographic function has four main or significant properties: it is easy (but not necessarily quick) to compute the hash value for any given message; it is infeasible to generate a message that has a given hash; it is infeasible to modify a message without changing the hash; and, it is infeasible to find two different messages with the same hash.
Cryptographic hash functions have many information security applications, notably in digital signatures, message authentication codes (MACs), and other forms of authentication. They can also be used as ordinary hash functions, to index data in hash tables, for fingerprinting, to detect duplicate data or uniquely identify files, and as checksums to detect accidental data corruption. Indeed, in information security contexts, cryptographic hash values re sometimes called digital fingerprints, checksums, or just hash values, even though all these terms stand for functions with rather different properties and purposes.